Groupe Chronos

A vision: Digital communication will transform citizens into forms of media, Sociologist Bruno Marzloff predicts.

On one hand we have the price of gas rising, the housing market vacillating and our purchasing power decreasing. On the other hand, we have a society that values the mobility of its people, its goods, and of its information. How will this circulation, moving in every which way, change urban space? From the point of view of Bruno Marzloff, mobility sociologist who heads both Group Chronos and the program City2.0 with FING (the Foundation of the Internet New Generation).

How do you see the future of mobility in the city ?

Every day, in France, 160 hectares are taken over by urban sprawl and the farther people move away from the city centers, the more we exacerbated the use of unnecessary mobility. With the price of the barrel exploding, the congestion normally caused by cars is getting pushed onto our public transportation. I see the oil crisis and the housing crisis as a chance to improve the rate of usership of our urban public transportation resources. Those two crises will radically change our way of thinking with the idea of smart and socially useful cars: one self-service car available for rent equates to 10 fewer cars on the road. Vélib' proves that this virtuous circle is possible. More generally, we are moving towards a fluidity of connections between the car, the bike, the metro and work. But mobility in tomorrow's society goes beyond the transportation of people and goods. Digital information allows us to reduce a number of physical trips we take. With teleconferences, Cisco claims to have not made 27,000 trips this year. Smart cell phones armed with the web and with geo-locating capabilities (GPS, triangulation) will bring an infinite amount of services to the city, available 'on the go.' We will be living right in the middle of the era of the fifth screen.

What does hearing the words "fifth screen" make you think of ?

Today we are living among four types of screens: the cinema (public), the television (private but collective), the computer (personal), and the cell phone (intimate). The fifth screen is the elongation of those screens into the public space, with a cell phone as the pivotal tool and the Internet as support.

This marks the coming of ambient urban information technology, in a context where widespread smart cell phones dialogue with an under layer of smart chips spread throughout the public space. We see the beginnings: to improve the predictability of traffic, the public transportation company of San Francisco created a twitter, a system with bits of information online, accessible from a cell phone, that alerts clients about traffic jams and allows them in return to alert the operator.

The information circulates in the form of a text on the cell phones of subscribers who take advantage of this exchange. In this way, the city becomes familiar as conversations are established between citizens

Doesn't an "all digital" urban area present a threat?

The urban space and its citizens become a medium: they are receptors, emitters and intermediaries. They produce traces and capture data. The fifth screen is the instrument of surveillance. It generates and exploits these traces of communication - but without traces there would be no services. But there is also the idea of "sous-veillence" where the masses survey the surveyor. The more the people use this network, the more there will be self-regulations. Historian Michel de Certeau claims that the inventions we use in our daily lives actually create the individual. I would add today that the intelligences of these inventions evolve for their user by the interaction with their user.

Read the article in French here.